April 21st 2017

One of the yearly tasks you have to do as Chief Executive is to write the opening statement for the Annual Report and Accounts. That may not sound very exciting, but it is an opportunity for me to thank a lot of people and also to highlight some of the challenges and achievements of the last 12 months. It’s easy to forget that, despite all the challenges, our people are managing to achieve some really fabulous things, over and above the day job.

You’ll have to wait for the report to come out to read it in full (oh yes!) but some of the high spots which spring quickly to mind are:

Our volunteers receiving the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Services in October

The Diamond jubilee celebrations for three of our League of Friend associations, celebrating 60 years

Being rated ‘Good’ once again by CQC

New MRI scanners and LINACS (Linear Accelerators)

The fabulous Celebrating Success Staff Awards, back in September

A staggering 1373 years of Long Service, recognised at a celebration for 45 colleagues in December

Being shortlisted for no fewer than three HSJ patient safety awards

National awards for the Patient Experience team

. . . to name but a few!

Talking of patient experience – just a quick trailer – it’s our first ever Patient Experience Week next week and I’m looking forward to attending the launch at the beginning of the week, as well as the Patient Experience Awards at the end of the week, recognising some of the great work and ideas going on to improve the experience of our patients.

One of the important parts of the life of the Trust is our role in teaching and education. In recent blogs I have mentioned our part in the GP training scheme, our support for the new nursing associate role and indeed our relationships with key higher education providers, such as the University of Nottingham, University of Derby and Derby College.

We’re also very much involved in developing NHS managers and I’m always keen to welcome national general management trainees here at Derby. It was lovely to catch up this week with Caitlin Richens, a graduate management trainee currently working in the role of Assistant General Manager in Operations.

Caitlin has been working with our operations team to help us keep the ‘show on the road’ over the winter. She has shown great initiative, together with Mr John Hooley, one of our surgeons in training - an ST3 in Trauma and Orthopaedics, in putting us forward for a national Sir Peter Carr award. This relates to how we make our services more accessible to everyone in our community, including those who might be less able, for a whole range of reasons, to access the care they need from us.

Supporting the learning and development of all our staff groups is an important responsibility we have as a teaching hospital, but meeting Caitlin served to remind me that we get so much in return from our trainees, including apprentices, student nurses, doctors in training and many more.

What else have I been up to this week? I spent Thursday afternoon with leaders of health and social care organisations in Derbyshire to work through the next steps of our Sustainability and Transformation plan, so that we use our partnership to provide better care and do a better job for the people we serve.

Within the last week or so Simon Stevens, the Chief Executive of NHS England, has published an update of the Five Year Forward View. One of the interesting features of this is that Sustainability and Transformation Plans are now being described as ‘sustainability and transformation partnerships’. This may seem to be just a question of semantics, but for me the real value of this is not in the production of a document, but more about how we work together practically. This work will help us to deliver more joined up care and better experience for patients, along with trying to keep people fit and well and in their own homes as far as possible.

Finally, I’d like to finish with a big ‘thank you’ to all my colleagues who worked over Easter weekend and did such a brilliant job of looking after our patients. As expected, our emergency services were in great demand, but, as I have seen time and time again, everyone pulled together to ensure patients were safe and received good care.

Have a good weekend

Gavin

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